I'll try to make this a European urban setting, involving a fountain and a small café's terrace. It'll take me some effort to do all this in only 4 weeks, but I'll give it a shot (I'm abroad till 23 April, and probably very busy after that).

Era
I have not yet decided on the period. It'll either be a WWII story, or something more recent.

Location
This will either be in Paris or someone in Italy. I'll look into some of my holiday pictures and see if I find something suitable.

Figures
I found an interesting figure by Verlinden (left in figure) pooring coffee. . Though this is a german soldier, I'll make it a civilian waiter pooring the coffee. At the table, I'll either seat one or two soldiers (playing chess, reading a newspaper, having a smoke, trying to get fresh with a local beauty, ... to be decided). If I go for modern army, I'll make it a US soldier in woodland pattern.

Buildings.
I have not yet decided if there'll be a building in this dio. Time will be the decisive factor for that. I'd like to make a café shopfront, though... Maybe "Au Général" ?
Of course there will be the fountain. I think I'll scratchbuild that one, to make it better fit into the dio.

Other elements.
A terrace needs chairs and tables, and I found those. I'll have to plunder an old diorama, but I have a nice table that I'll resin copy till I have four or five. I have two copies already. I cast a table, do some typing on this website, check and demold when dry, cast another one, etc... I have nice matching chairs, but those will be a lot more difficult to copy. Finally, I'll build a tree. It will be near (sheltering over) the terrace. Maybe I can arrange the typical European metal grids in the sidewalk to place the tree. The tree will be the same kind as in my winter dio, but smaller.

Water
Ah yes. The water.... I'm pondering on that. Last year, I bought transparent resin to cast my M35 headlights. This is not epoxy, but polyurethane resin. Since I bought a liter (minimum quantity) and I used about ten grams of that, I have enough to flood the whole dio to the figures' waists. Still I'm not sure I'll use that. I'm very tempted to try the paint+varnish technique instead. Painting a layer of paint, then a layer of varnish with 50% paint, then a layer with 20% paint, 5%, 2%, just a drop, then pure varnish. This gives a great effect. I'll probably add a fountain of sorts, so the water comes splashing down into the fountain basin.
And to top it off, I might have the waiter poor the coffee, too.

What do you think ?

Hey Jan if I were you I would see if they make a water fountain for like doll houses or something like that.You never know what youll find with that stuff.

Thanks, buddy. There's a choice of almost 10 fountains at the local hobby shop here. But I'll get over the 30$ budget limit if I go for those. I'd prefer spending the money on a nice figure or two, maybe a bicicle parked against the café window, details like that.
Scratchbuilding a fountain can't be all that hard... I hope.

General,
Scratchbuilding the fountain won't be hard at all. The hard part (for me at least) is finding a good reference idea. I have been mulling over whether I will enter this, my first, online campaign. Motivation being my only true enemy, I probably won't this time around.

Like the idea w/ the waiter. With the waiter tho, you almost Have to include the building front. Again, easy and cheap to scratch if you have a good photo.

Good luck,

Yeah I've encountered that problem also lol.You should do like some fancy fountain just get the extra points for being a exotic dio. #:-)

JAn

you could try to scratch built the fountain from the Allo Allo series. I know they broadcast it in belgium so you have to know it. i believe I have a picture of it and the basic shape is quite simple. It will be easy to do with styrofoam.

I`ll look the picture up or else I make a drawing of it. If you want of course

let me know

Robert ! I already thought about the "Allo Allo" café, but I don't have pictures of it. I never noticed a fountain in Allo Allo, though. I look forward to seeing that picture.
Jan

Jan

Ik ga gewoon ff voor je op zoek naar dat plaatje. Ik weet dat ik het ergens heb. En als ik het niet heb dan teken ik hem voor je ant ik weet precies hoe ie eruit ziet

For inspiration and ideas for reference I usually head to the library or book store. I go the the history section and let my imagination run. I don't always focus on WWII or period history. Political history has yeilded some good reference photos of leaders making speaches in interesting buildings.
I will look in the architecture section too.

And don't forget the gallery here there are lots of ideas that you can spin your own idea from.

I took a late start, but now I'm back from Asia and I have some more time in the evenings, I started working on this campaign.

Ground base
The ground base will be a plaster copy (resin mold) of an older dio I made. That took about a week, but most of this time was to let the silicone harden, make a few castings, clean them up, patch them together into something nice. I also use one of Monroe Perdu"s tree grates. If I have time left, I'll make a small tree that sits over the café terrace. We'll see about that. I now know from experience that making the tree takes about a whole weekend.


Walls
I'm sure the dio will look nicer with a wall , so the fountain is surrounded at all sides. Instead of using "flat" walls, I decided to make some brickwork. I started by casting a piece of plaster (dentist' plaster, which is really hard, shows a lot of detail and can be scribled with a knife or a scribling tool). Now I'm drawing lines in the plaster to outline the bricks.
I started with a classic brick design, but that looks a bit dull. So now I restarted to make a whole wall like this :

I'm about at 2/3 of the job. When all bricks are scribled, I'll make sure there's some "relief" in there to make it look more convincing. Make some bricks stick out a bit, chip some others, make sure some are just a bit different. I think it will look really good.
When the plaster plate is finished, I'll make a silicone copy and cast several. This may allow me to throw in a café shopfront, made from this brick design... ? At least I'll have enough to make the walls AND the fountain material. Then I'll try to find something that shows 'pooring" water into the fountain; to make it look a bit more alive. I'm still thinking how to do this, but I'll work something out. Ideally, I'll make this a brick or bronze lion's head that spits the water into the fountain pond. But where to find a convincing lion's head in the right scale ? Hmmm...



Café terrace
I already casted four tables and a large number of chairs. I'll only place those when the dio is done. I think three will be enough...

figures
I have discovered a nice British soldier that would be nice to sit at table. I'll have to find bent legs to seat him, but I'm sure my spares box will help out.
A British officer would look splendid, too, but this is a metal figure (WOLF) and I very much dislike painting metal figures. We'll see about those. They are quite expensive, so they may be out of budget for this project.

Here's the tree grate I refered to. You still see them in many European cities, though they get replaced by more modern (and cheaper) grates. My home town of Bruges was full of them when I was a kid. I still saw them in Paris a few months ago, and Brussels and Antwerp have them too. They are made of steel (or cast iron ?).
The grates of Monroe Perdu are made from laser-cut card. If I add a tree to the dio, I'm sure I'll fit in one of these. I bought a few, so my fingers itch to use them. (but there's the budget thing... ! )

hoi jan

waar koop jij merendeel van al je modelbouwmateriaal ?? Waar ik ga in Aalst is alles zo beperkt en een jong vogeltje wil nu eenmaal zijn vleugels uitslaan !!

alvast bedankt

dmd

ps, dat water waar koop je zoiets ??

Hi, dmd

In the Dutch forum there's a post of model shops in Holland and Belgium. I mostly shop in Antwerp, at all of the shops I added to the list. For water I sometimes use liquid polyutherane from Voss. The shop is also in the Dutch Forum.
I buy some things through the internet, though. www.monroeperdu.com has nice things, but there are many others. Check the many links you see on Armorama. There's good stuff there. Shipping and customs costs can be high though.
Jan